Following one man's task of building a virtual world from the comfort of his pajamas. Discusses Procedural Terrain, Vegetation and Architecture generation. Also OpenCL, Voxels and Computer Graphics in general.

Tuesday, September 29, 2015

The same network effect that made cities preferable to the countryside was multiplied as networks have gone all electric and digital. But networks are only as important as the stuff they carry. For a digital network, that would be data.

A very interesting property of voxels to me is their simplicity. The simpler it is to produce, share and consume a data format, the better chance it has to multiply across a network.

This is not only because simplicity makes things practical and easier. I believe you can only own those things you understand. Without true ownership of your data, any hope for its democratic production or consumption is lost.

This is how we see people sharing voxel content:

The data format used here is quite simple and hopefully universal at describing 3D content. I'll get to it in a future post.

The reference for the entire C++ library is covered in the programmer's section. The actual code is not there (sorry, we still require to license) but you can see all the headers, classes, etc. It may give you a good idea of how the whole thing works and is built.

Also here is an oldie we never got to publish. It shows how a single tool, the selection box, can be used to perform many different tasks.

My favorite bit is around the 5 minute mark, where the Cut&Paste is used to reshape an existing arcade. That is a good example of emergent possibilities coming out of very simple mechanics.

Also we got two team members to share their work sessions over twitch. It is mostly Voxel Studio but also how the assets that go into a Voxel Farm project are created. They stream most days: